Progressives Spin Into a “Left Wing Crack Up”

It was in the mid-1980s that I resuscitated the term “crack-up” and applied it to political movements that were not very healthy. I say I resuscitated the term because it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who first used it as a title for a 1945 collection of essays that were mostly personal and first published between the 1930s and 1940s. When he did finally crack up the term fell into disuse.

Then I reviewed the state of the liberal coalition and the state of the conservative coalition and decided the term applied to both coalitions. I named one book The Liberal Crack-Up and the next The Conservative Crack-Up. Of the two books the liberal crack-up was most clearly observable.

The ideologues the 1980s practiced what I called Masked Politics, and like participants at a masked ball no one objected. It went on for decades:

The environmentalists confronted working people, the affirmative action advocates confronted those who were pushed aside, and consumerists regulated the goods of the consumers. America was confused on these matters but relatively quiet. Yet two things happened rather recently that disturbed the peace. Donald Trump got tired of making money and decided to get into politics, representing the aggrieved Americans who had been quiet long enough. Also, the rising generation of progressives got into politics and for them Masked Politics were not enough. They really believed in the environmentalists’ jeremiads and they had through the years acquired still more complaints: racism! misogyny! homophobia! border walls! They included all their complaints a few weeks ago in their Green New Deal wherein they would curtail such things as air travel, the internal combustion engine, most buildings bereft of thatched roofs, and diapers for cows.

The constituent elements of the American left have radicalized, and they are tearing the Democratic Party apart.

Meanwhile Donald Trump has delivered on a growing economy, deregulation, strong borders, the rule of law.

The radicalized Democrats are now running as socialists. In the middle of a growing economy they are casting their lot with Venezuela. They expect to win in 2020. Call it the left-wing crack-up.